Cocktails at Le Carmen

Chapter three

Reaching over to Scott's side of the bed as the alarm woke me from a fitful sleep the next morning, my hand met with cool sheet and not his familiar warmth as I had expected. Momentarily panicked, I sat up, realising that I would wake up alone like this every morning once I'd moved to Paris. I relaxed as I heard the bathroom door open and the sound of Scott walking out into the kitchen.

"Morning, sleepyhead," he said, tousling my hair as he came into the bedroom and handed me a steaming mug of coffee.

"I have an early morning meeting to get to, but I think I can spare twenty minutes," he winked as he let the towel around his waist drop to the floor.

I batted away his advances and sat up.

"I don't feel like it," I said moodily, and got out of bed.

"Chloe, come on," Scott said, surprised. "You're always up for it."

At the look on his face—a mixture of hurt and hope—I relented, and let him draw me to him, wondering, not for the first time, why I was trying to punish him for encouraging me to do what I knew I should be doing.

He left for work thirty-five minutes later, planting a kiss on the back of my neck as I stood in front of the mirror, searching for signs of fine lines on my twenty-six-year-old face and debating what to do with my shoulder-length dark brown hair. I twisted this way and that, trying to imagine what I'd look like with an elfin crop or if I were to dye my hair bright red.

Dropping my Blackberry into my bag alongside the contract, which bore the hesitant black scrawl of my signature in all the required places, I slid my feet into my ballet flats and picked up my keys as I closed the door behind me.

I wasn't sure how the Paris metro compared with the tube, but one thing I wouldn't miss was being squashed up against someone's armpit as I rode the northern line to Leicester Square and switched to the Piccadilly line that would take me to Barons Court.

Scott was right, I thought, feeling more upbeat as I passed through the doors to work and strode purposefully towards Sandra's office to hand her the contract. There were people here who wouldn't emerge unscathed after the redundancy missile hit—people who had children to support and mortgages to pay. Angie, a mother-hen type in her late forties, was still many years away from retirement, but might not find another job with hours flexible enough to let her provide her disabled son with the care that he needed. Particularly when, as she had said two days earlier when we had the 'what would we do if handed our p45s' conversation, most of the other job hunters out there were not only half her age, but twice as qualified.

I didn't know whether Kate, one of my closest friends both in and out of the office, had been made redundant, but I knew she had an ex-husband who wasn't terribly forthcoming with the maintenance payments for their eight-year-old daughter.

Angie, Kate, and I had arranged to go for lunch that day along with our other colleague, Pamela, and I knew that I would find it hard to get any real work done until we were all sat down together in the corner booth of our favourite Italian restaurant, Giorgio's.

Sandra was engrossed in a pile of paperwork as I knocked at her door and placed the signed contract on her desk.

"Thanks, Chloe," she said, looking up momentarily, the strain of having to bear the brunt of these redundancy talks showing in the dark circles under her eyes and the slight downturn to her mouth. "We'll sit down with Alain first thing next week to discuss the logistics of the move."

"Thanks, Sandra," I echoed, backing out of her office and heading towards my desk. Lunchtime couldn't roll around fast enough as I sat trying to draft a press release about an anti-ageing perfume. Anti-ageing face cream? Yes. Anti-ageing body wash? Maybe. But perfume? Even I, who planned to use every trick in the book to stave off the crow's feet and turkey neck, found this invention more than a little bizarre. What if you didn't spray it on evenly? Would your neck appear youthful from one side and haggard from the other?